Back in 2002, before there was a SHEG, Wineburg launched his approach in a course for prospective high school teachers in the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP).
“STEP was really a laboratory for developing these new teaching methods,” said Wineburg, who piloted curriculum materials he developed with his first two teaching assistants, Chauncey Monte-Sano, PhD ’06, and Daisy Martin, PhD ’06. (Monte-Sano is now a professor of education at the University of Michigan, and Martin directs the History & Civics Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz.)
The document-based curriculum his team created, called Reading Like a Historian, introduced students to historical thinking, a set of skills historians use to analyze and understand historical events in context. Using primary sources designed to be accessible at different grade levels, students investigate questions about history: Did enslaved people build the Great Pyramid at Giza? Why did U.S. senators oppose joining the League of Nations in 1919? Was Social Security revolutionary, or a program designed to appease Americans who wanted more profound change?
The first major test of the curriculum came in 2008, when Abby Reisman, PhD ’11 (now an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania), led a large-scale study with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).
Students in the test classes showed not only an increased ability to retain historical knowledge and a greater appreciation for history, but also improvements in reading comprehension and critical thinking.
This twofold finding reflects the curriculum’s ability to bridge skills that K-12 history teachers sometimes view in conflict, said Rob McEntarffer, supervisor of assessment and evaluation for Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska, a district that has participated in SHEG research over the years and integrated its resources into the curriculum.
“There’s long been a pendulum swinging back and forth between an emphasis on content knowledge versus critical thinking skills,” McEntarffer said. “Some teachers identify as content experts and emphasize historical content in their classroom, and others think that students are going to forget all the content, so they want to emphasize 21st-century thinking skills. But SHEG’s research [showed] that it’s a false dichotomy.”
After the SFUSD trial, at the district’s request, Wineburg and his team built a website to house the investigational curriculum. “We called ourselves the Stanford History Education Group and posted our materials online,” said Wineburg. “And to our tremendous surprise, we realized that people were downloading them from all over the country.”